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Sunday, November 17, 2013

The Photoshop doodling continues. Today I bring you two that I did
fairly quickly. The one with the princess was inspired by Adventure Time
and my own interest in not actually drawing something detailed. The
second doodle is my reaction to said outpouring of simplified drawing
which includes squiggles and emotional jabs at the "canvas." (No tablets
were harmed in the making of this doodle)

I hope you enjoy them. I certainly did!

Don't ask me why she's flying! She just is. Accept it.

This one I think is sad about her tree, but she could just be the moody type...

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Whew! That one took a while, but thanks to tooling around on the interwebz, I was able to find another tutorial to spark some inspiration to paint.

This painting is yet another concept of an earlier sketch, also posted to Sketcherific back in the day (in fact it was my first post ever!), and has been lingering around on the fringes of my mind for a long time. I was very happy to be brave and paint completely on one layer. I still kept my line work separate. However, I made heavier use of highlighting the line work after I was done with a majority of the painting.

I'm not sure I'm happy with the background color. I think it may be interfering with the figure's clothing. Perhaps that will be fodder for another post!

Here's the final product:

And here's a close up of the face of course! I'm happy with how that came out.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

I've been working on this for a while. Probably far too long for just black and white, but the process has been good. It looks a lot more like the black and white drawings I do on the old fashioned medium I used to use exclusively for drawing: paper. I'm pretty pleased with the effect.

It started out as a loose sketch, then a tight sketch. The tight sketch wasn't doing what I wanted, and the pose was stiff and too affected. So I took what I liked best and worked on that: the face. After that was coming out well, I moved back to the pose and worked out a more natural gesture where the subject was standing instead of sitting. There was still difficulty with the way I was making the linework very tight, rigid. Pooling the blacks made it look better and the gesture started to look more natural. I didn't want it to be completely blobbed and undefined though so I tried to make the hands stand out with some detail and worked reductively on the robe around the body. The collar was added last; it may be too detailed and refined for the rest of the image.

If I were to edit this I would either A) Remove the collar completely and leave the image well enough alone, or B) add other points of detail, perhaps on the wrists or somewhere lower on the robe to match the collar.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Here's another experiment. I made another brush and customized it's properties more to my taste. I was able to figure out how to do a basic grisaille underpainting/sketch, set them to multiply and then added the color and highlights in separate layers thanks to some online tutorials that reminded me this technique existed. Actually, this is a very common technique in traditional painting and I've used it before. I don't know what it is about the digital medium, but it has this ability to make you forget everything you learned when you were working traditionally when that's not really the goal. I think half my battle will be just understanding how to use the digital tools exactly the way I used my traditional brushes and paint. I just have buttons and settings to set correctly before I get the right effect.

The background was also fun. I really didn't have much of a plan for it except that I wanted it to convey the light source's direction.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Brushes can make a big difference in the feel of a piece both in traditional media and digital media. With that in mind I switched to a softer, more natural brush from the Photoshop family of pre-loads. I'm also trying to refresh some of my portrait and skin-tone knowledge. Here's the result:

Saturday, July 20, 2013

I've been giving color a try. I have tried to achieve the airbrushed look on a few test run sketches, but really, they need to be cleaned up more before I can really go to town with detailed, realistic coloring. That and it takes a long time. I was looking for results so I skipped the detailed drawing, did a quick sketch of a fox and slapped some color on it to see if I liked it or not. At this point, I don't feel like it's a bad first attempt. I'm looking forward to trying a few more effects.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

A while ago I posted a sketch of a boat without oars floating in the ocean. I've been trying to hone my digital drawings skills and get more comfortable with the stylus/tablet combination. I felt this drawing was suitably minimal to do that with; since digital media has so many avenues - the possibilities really seem endless - I wanted to start out with something simple and just play. I also limited my pallet to black and white to help simplify things and keep everything "familiar." I'm enjoying learning this new media more intimately.

I decided to re-post the original sketch alongside my digital sketch as a nice comparison, rather than just linking to the original post.